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Workstation Performance Processor Shootout...

I was cruisin' around looking for some news this afternoon and stumbled upon something relatively interesting over at Hot Hardware. GamePC is having a shootout among "workstation performance processors". Uniprocessor and Dual processor configurations are represented.

AMD's Athlon MP family of processors are quickly becoming favorites of 3D modelers and designers the world-over, and with this level of performance, we can see why. Even with a 266 MHz clock speed and 256k L2 cache disadvantage compared to the 2.0 GHz Xeon system, the Athlon MP processors at 1.73 GHz manage to give the fastest Maya rendering performance for this benchmark.

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todder
Unregistered User

Posts: 2058
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#17456 Posted on: 08/03/2002 01:56 AM
I know this is a little off topic but that it is a good place to post it. I have fell in love with Photoshop, lightwave, brice, soon to play with maya. This is what I will have at the end of the month, tell me what I can do to improve it. I have little of cash floating around

I you were me what would you do differently. Thanks
[COLOR="Blue"]". . . I think a general Government [is] necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this [The Constitution] is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. "
-Benjamin Franklin
[/COLOR]

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Shadow Knight
Something Witty

Posts: 261
Joined: 2002-07-04

#17457 Posted on: 08/03/2002 02:01 AM
Heh, I would put ram in it.
At the end of the road, the ferry you must take...

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trapine
SMP low poster

Posts: 39
Joined: 2001-05-11

#17458 Posted on: 08/03/2002 02:02 AM
For disk swap intensive applications You could try getting a fast seek time harddrive and dedicate it for swap space. Since you already have scsi you could get a 15000 rpm drive and install you apps on that, and use it for swap space.

You could think about raiding your matched drives, from what I hear XP's software raid, although not bootable, is pretty good.

Other than that, I drool on your box and wish that the salary fairy would come and leave a check under my pillow.
BORK!

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Raid?
Yea but what happens when OS Crashes. And where can I get a 15k drive under $100
[COLOR="Blue"]". . . I think a general Government [is] necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this [The Constitution] is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. "
-Benjamin Franklin
[/COLOR]

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C.A.Shirley
Registered User

Posts: 1070
Joined: 2001-02-28

#17460 Posted on: 08/03/2002 03:09 AM
WTF with the Microsoft compiler test on page 7 of that article:confused:
They say that they know-for-a-fact that the compiler suite is multithreaded, but there is something seriously wrong with that benchmark. Like, maybe they forgot to tell the compiler to use multiple compile threads? (For example, if I build a kernel, in linux, I pass a -j 3 to make, and voil
"Chicks dig giant robots!"

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rmn
oh my, it's huge!

Posts: 5894
Joined: 2002-01-26

#17461 Posted on: 08/03/2002 04:08 AM

Originally posted by todder I know this is a little off topic but that it is a good place to post it. I have fell in love with Photoshop, lightwave, brice, soon to play with maya. This is what I will have at the end of the month, tell me what I can do to improve it. I have little of cash floating around

If you don't have the GF4 yet, don't buy the 4400. Get a good Ti 4200 instead (you can usually overclock them to the Ti 4400's speed, and even if you don't, the difference is very small). Same goes for the drives; get one or two big IDE drives instead (ex., 60 or 80 GB 7200 RPM Maxtors / WDs). As long as you're only reading 1-2 files at a time, SCSI has almost no advantage over fast ATA drives. And with the money you save on the drives and GF4, get as much RAM as you can.

RMN
~~~

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They say that they know-for-a-fact that the compiler suite is multithreaded, but there is something seriously wrong with that benchmark. Like, maybe they forgot to tell the compiler to use multiple compile threads? (For example, if I build a kernel, in linux, I pass a -j 3 to make, and voil

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C.A.Shirley
Registered User

Posts: 1070
Joined: 2001-02-28

#17463 Posted on: 08/03/2002 05:56 AM

Originally posted by glitch If the compiler is still the same way in VS.net, then this would suggest the authors didn't really understand what they were doing.

Well, it is a gaming site...
"Chicks dig giant robots!"

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AndyInAtlanta
synerdata.com

Posts: 128
Joined: 2002-03-04

#17464 Posted on: 08/03/2002 06:57 AM

Originally posted by rmn

If you don't have the GF4 yet, don't buy the 4400. Get a good Ti 4200 instead (you can usually overclock them to the Ti 4400's speed, and even if you don't, the difference is very small). Same goes for the drives; get one or two big IDE drives instead (ex., 60 or 80 GB 7200 RPM Maxtors / WDs). As long as you're only reading 1-2 files at a time, SCSI has almost no advantage over fast ATA drives. And with the money you save on the drives and GF4, get as much RAM as you can.

RMN
~~~

I'd do whatever it takes to stick with a SCSI storage system. Check out storagereview.com for drive comparisons (and mention them @ hypermicro.com and get free shipping -- hard to beat that). Rather than 2 10K 18G's, you might want to go with a single 15Krpm for swap/OS/Apps and and other disk-intensive stuff, and slap a big-ole-IDE drive on the side for bulk storage.

And the 1Gig of RAM you mentioned is the minimum I'd recommend in such a system -- you ought to consider 512MB DIMMS to allow you room to expand down the road if you want. You'll like the option (vs 256MB DIMMS) since you'll be slinging around large graphics/multi-media type data.

Oh, and be sure to report back with an update on how it all turns out...

Andy

Comment

Any modern ATA drive will give you over 20 MB/s sustained transfer rate, even if you're reading multiple files at the same time. Add a bus-mastering DMA controller and you get virtually no CPU utilisation. The only situation where single-drive SCSI has an advantage over single-drive ATA right now is for servers that need to read & write a lot of files simultaneously. Apart from that, it's a waste (of money & technology).

If you'll be working with high-resolution images, what you really need is all the RAM you can get. Of course, if you can afford large SCSI drives and lots of RAM, that's even better.

RMN
~~~

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todder
Unregistered User

Posts: 2058
Joined: 2002-01-30

#17466 Posted on: 08/03/2002 06:18 PM
OK this is what I already have.

2 X 10k drives, I will not give these up. RMN, Have you ever used SCSI? If IDE where just as fast why does SCSI Still sell. SCSI is like a dual rig once you use it you wont go back.

512 MB ram 1 stick

GeForce4 4400

Viewsonic E79fb X 1

RMN, please dont bring this into another argument. Im not in the mood.
[COLOR="Blue"]". . . I think a general Government [is] necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this [The Constitution] is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. "
-Benjamin Franklin
[/COLOR]

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rmn
oh my, it's huge!

Posts: 5894
Joined: 2002-01-26

#17467 Posted on: 08/03/2002 07:04 PM

Originally posted by todder RMN, Have you ever used SCSI? If IDE where just as fast why does SCSI Still sell. SCSI is like a dual rig once you use it you wont go back.

Yes, I have used SCSI. In fact, I used SCSI exclusively for a long time, and still have a couple of SCSI arrays here. It sells mainly for four reasons:

1) Not limited to 2 drives per channel (plus you can connect scanners, etc.).

4) Some people always buy SCSI for the same reason that some people always buy Intel or always buy Apple or always buy Sony: religion.

My point was: if you're going to work mostly in Photoshop and Maya, SCSI is a waste. Just like a GF4 or a Wildcat are a waste if you're going to run Excel all day long. If you have a limited amount of money, there are other things you should invest on. Working in graphics needs a fast CPU, lots of RAM and lots of disk space.

Naturally, people are free to buy whatever they want. For all I care, you could buy a Celeron with a 5.25" floppy and spend the rest of your money on a fibre network. You asked what we'd do differently so I told you what I'd do differently (and in fact have been doing differently in all our workstations for a few years).

But if you already have the drives, no point in throwing them away, of course.

RMN
~~~

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JEC252
Too much time on my hands

Posts: 3697
Joined: 2001-05-23

#17468 Posted on: 08/03/2002 07:12 PM
Actually, with a real ATA RAID controller (e.g. the 2400A and if you find any others let me know) you can get close to SCSI performance (well, 128 Mb of cache certainly helps), but where SCSI really shines and blows even that out of the water is multiple simultaneously qued reads and/or writes, where elevator seeking takes place. Then it blows ATA cleanly out of the water.

Oh, access times too. An X15 has slightly higher than half of the access time of a 7200 RPM ATA drive. When using it for swap, it's the way to go. If you want more info, Upaboveit has a reputation with SCSI devices. Perhaps you've heard of it.Once again we've saved civilization as we know it.
And the good news is, they're not gonna prosecute!

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JEC252
Too much time on my hands

Posts: 3697
Joined: 2001-05-23

#17469 Posted on: 08/03/2002 07:14 PM
Back OT, however, the review was the standard faire but I'm disappointed that the video cards they installed did not have multithreaded drivers (the GF4's do not). Especially given the price of a good workstation card now.Once again we've saved civilization as we know it.
And the good news is, they're not gonna prosecute!

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todder
Unregistered User

Posts: 2058
Joined: 2002-01-30

#17470 Posted on: 08/03/2002 07:49 PM

Originally posted by JEC252 Back OT, however, the review was the standard faire but I'm disappointed that the video cards they installed did not have multithreaded drivers (the GF4's do not). Especially given the price of a good workstation card now.

Does the Quadro Have multithreaded drivers. Cus if they are i am useing those drivers for my GF4 at the moment.
[COLOR="Blue"]". . . I think a general Government [is] necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this [The Constitution] is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. "
-Benjamin Franklin
[/COLOR]

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JEC252
Too much time on my hands

Posts: 3697
Joined: 2001-05-23

#17471 Posted on: 08/03/2002 08:31 PM

Originally posted by todder

Does the Quadro Have multithreaded drivers. Cus if they are i am useing those drivers for my GF4 at the moment.

Yes and No. Currently the GF4 based Quadros (XGL) and the original Quadro do not AFAIK, but all others do. All are happy in SMP systems, however. The XGLs are expected to get SMP support shortly.

FGL, Wildcat and Oxygen drivers are all fully multithreaded.Once again we've saved civilization as we know it.
And the good news is, they're not gonna prosecute!

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rmn
oh my, it's huge!

Posts: 5894
Joined: 2002-01-26

#17472 Posted on: 08/03/2002 08:31 PM
I've read a lot of good things about the Escalade ATA RAID controllers (up to twelve ATA-133 drives). The Adaptec 2400 is nice, but a bit too expensive (and still limited to 4 drives). Shame you can't get similar performance out of the 1200.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by mutithreaded drivers. Do you mean from the GPU or the CPU's point of view?

BTW, ATi is working on plug-ins to actually use the GPU for the final rendering. That could turn out to be interesting.

RMN
~~~

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JEC252
Too much time on my hands

Posts: 3697
Joined: 2001-05-23

#17473 Posted on: 08/03/2002 08:36 PM
The 3ware Escalades are great but RAID 5 write performance is highly lacking. The 2400A is the closest to a "real" RAID controller that exists for ATA, with OCE, NDAC and all the goodies that even some of the high-end SCSI RAID controllers lack, plus the performance to match it. In fact, the 2400A usually has better RAID 5 scalability (going from 3-4 disks or from a single disk to RAID 5) than many of Adaptec's SCSI RAID controllers. It's a serious product.

And by multithreaded I mean from the POV of the OS, so if you were running, say, an MP3 compression program set to medium priority on CPU0 (using affinity) and another on CPU1, the drivers would split the load between the two CPUs evenly. Multithreaded drivers also lead to higher performance on SMP systems than their equivelant uniprocessor systems.

Edit (since rmn edited while I was posting in response to him):

Yes, the Escalade can support 12 drives, but the question becomes where is the target market for that? Data warehousing, clearly, but what kind of server would you need? A big one, I'd gander, to use all of that data effectively, and then the ATA storage subsystem becomes a bottleneck anyway so you usually go SCSI. And AFAIK RAID 5 write performance is still lacking.Once again we've saved civilization as we know it.
And the good news is, they're not gonna prosecute!

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rmn
oh my, it's huge!

Posts: 5894
Joined: 2002-01-26

#17474 Posted on: 08/03/2002 10:50 PM

Originally posted by JEC252 And by multithreaded I mean from the POV of the OS, so if you were running, say, an MP3 compression program set to medium priority on CPU0 (using affinity) and another on CPU1, the drivers would split the load between the two CPUs evenly.

Er... I'm sorry, but what do the graphics card's drivers have to do with MP3 encoders...? :confused:

And if you're running two processes, the OS is free to assign each to one CPU, right?

The big difference between the Quadro4 and the GF4 is not the fact the drivers are multithreaded, it's the fact the Quadro drivers use parts of the GPU that the GF4's simply ignore (mainly to do with culling / geometry processing, which isn't too critical for games).

But unless you're working with huge models, even a GF4 running the standard drivers will give you very good acceleration.

Originally posted by JEC252 Yes, the Escalade can support 12 drives, but the question becomes where is the target market for that? Data warehousing, clearly, but what kind of server would you need? A big one, I'd gander, to use all of that data effectively, and then the ATA storage subsystem becomes a bottleneck anyway so you usually go SCSI.

Er... what "ATA storage subsystem"? From the point of view of the OS, the Escalade controllers are SCSI. You mean the drives? I don't see why reading from 12 drives should be any slower than reading from 2 or 4. Each has a dedicated ATA-133 IDE channel, so that won't be a bottleneck either. The only bottleneck I can see is the PCI bus itself, but that would also affect PCI SCSI controllers. The Escalades are 64-bit cards, so they should be able to handle pretty high loads.

Yes, it's a pretty reduced market, and I definitely wouldn't have any use for a 12-channel controller, but it's still pretty impressive.

Originally posted by JEC252 And AFAIK RAID 5 write performance is still lacking.

Well, not according to the benchmarks I've seen (they have two RAID-5 modes, one of which is significantly faster than the other), but I've never tried them myself so I won't swear by them.

RMN
~~~

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Vandal
hook'in it up

Posts: 1290
Joined: 2001-04-21

#17475 Posted on: 08/04/2002 12:39 AM
So anyways, about the review.
I'm happy to see that a dual AMD box owned the others. That makes me feel a lot better when thinking about buying an AMD dually for Maya work.
The most dangerous people are the ones who know "a little" about computers.

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JEC252
Too much time on my hands

Posts: 3697
Joined: 2001-05-23

#17476 Posted on: 08/04/2002 08:28 AM
You do realize that the Escalade has no cache to perform parity operations. Drive for drive, the 2400A is faster. The Escalades are wonderful because they can scale so high, but I suspect that Adaptec is working on a SATA AAA controller.Once again we've saved civilization as we know it.
And the good news is, they're not gonna prosecute!

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rmn
oh my, it's huge!

Posts: 5894
Joined: 2002-01-26

#17477 Posted on: 08/04/2002 08:13 PM
I expect a lot of people are (including Promise and 3Ware). But I also suspect software RAID with SATA will be quite acceptable (at least for 2-4 drive arrays).

RMN
~~~

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JEC252
Too much time on my hands

Posts: 3697
Joined: 2001-05-23

#17478 Posted on: 08/04/2002 08:24 PM

Originally posted by rmn I expect a lot of people are (including Promise and 3Ware). But I also suspect software RAID with SATA will be quite acceptable (at least for 2-4 drive arrays).

I know Adaptec is really pushing SATA technology, along with Intel. They know that with SATA their ATA RAID controlers will jump to becoming much more competative, as the 2400A is way overpowered for the drives it has on it, and can easily scale to a faster i960 RISC chip and a couple more drives, but for lack of PCB. SATA will solve that problem (and probably more) for Adaptec. Adaptec is also big behind iSCSI since the FC-AL contract with Sun didn't pan out so they're going with the competing technology.Once again we've saved civilization as we know it.
And the good news is, they're not gonna prosecute!

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rmn
oh my, it's huge!

Posts: 5894
Joined: 2002-01-26

#17479 Posted on: 08/04/2002 10:18 PM
I've tried software RAID 0 with SCSI drives (6, I think) and it worked quite well. The problem with doing that with ATA is the fact that each channel can only be used by two drives (one, if you want the best performance). SATA should get rid of that problem. Of course, you'll still be using more CPU than with a dedicated RAID controller (not very relevant, especially if you have a duallie) and (more importantly) you won't have the benefits of the controller's cache. But it's a pretty good solution for home use if you're short on cash.

RMN
~~~

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rasp1
Registered User

Posts: 362
Joined: 2002-05-12

#17480 Posted on: 08/05/2002 08:47 PM
What is the advantages of sata? Just smaller size and a slight boost in bus speed? You lose one drive per channel. Are we going to get just 2 channel boards now, or are the MB manu's going to make 3/4 channel boards?
I do see the step forward this tech is making, but I think that the fact they are trying to keep software compatibilty is going to end up hamstringing this product. [/hijack]
I'm glad that AMD is starting to ge the recognigion that they deserve. I know a lot of people don't want to, but they make a damn good product. And at a very good price.
rasp